Egg countdown

I counted forward from the date we got the chickens and realized last week that we're close to the magic number -- 18 weeks -- when our hens will be old enough to begin laying eggs.

Of course, we do still have our fingers crossed that they're hens. Their voices are changing, like adolescent boys. Mathilda and Wilma now make clucking noises, and Wilma occasionally lets loose a loud honk.

One of my colleagues whose chickens are about the same age recently discovered that one is a rooster. Tell-tale sign: early-morning crowing. Additional evidence: a bossy manner and a curling plume of a tail. I think he has decided to slaughter it, following the philosophy of Michael Pollan the author.

All of our chickens have straight, short tail feathers, and Mathilda, who has almost no comb or wattles at all and the very shortest tail feathers, is the bossiest.

I just couldn't slaughter my own chicken, even if one does turn out to be a rooster. I'm a coward. I don't even like squashing bugs, and my daughter forces upon me a moral dilemma every time she finds a moth in her room, since she's terrified of moths (go figure) and they cannot be easily caught bare-handed without damaging the wings. I try to catch and release, but it's time-consuming and it doesn't help to know that the moth will probably be dead in a week anyway.

The origin of names

Wilma the chicken is named after my grandmother Wilma, who was born into a railroading family and grew up in a small town in Arkansas. She eventually married a successful, cigar-chomping man in the advertising industry, and moved to Washington D.C. The two of them traveled frequently to Europe, and when I was a kid, they would send us package of souvenirs from Rome and France and Spain. Wilma my grandmother could play "Kitten on the Keys" on the piano, owned a mink coat, and had a suitcase with stickers plastered on it from famous European hotels, like Hotel de Crillon in Paris.

Most likely she wouldn't have been especially flattered to have a chicken named after her. But now I think of her every time I think of Wilma the chicken.

Early risers

One thing about having chickens is that, for better or worse, I rarely sleep in now. If it's a sunny morning, I wake up at 7 a.m. and immediately start thinking about the need to get the chickens out of their coop. (Of course, on weekdays I wake up at 7 anyway, but now I get up at that hour on the weekends, too, even without an alarm to wake me.) Usually, by the time I get out to the coop, the chickens are making a bumping, thumping racket in the coop -- it sounds like they're body-slamming the door. I have even seen Wilma try to fly out the tiny plexiglas window -- haven't they figured out by now that they can't do that?!!

So, that's the bad, never being able to sleep in. The good is that summer mornings are so lovely in Seattle, especially when it's already sunny by 7 a.m. The rays of the sun slanting across the yard, the cool shadows cast by our big Douglas firs and the pleasant sounds of flickers and songbirds all add up to a peaceful, serene start to the day.

I usually make myself a cup of tea and then go outside and sit on the little bench at the end of the chicken run. The companionable chickens hang out at the far end of the run with me, preening their feathers in the morning sun while I sip my tea and plan my day. There's little traffic at that hour so I almost feel like I'm in a park, although occasionally I hear a boat down at the Ballard bridge tooting its horn to make the bridge tender raise the bridge.

The Egg and I

I've just finished reading "The Egg and I" by Betty MacDonald, that "enduring classic" about a Seattle woman who marries an older man in the late 1920s and moves to a rural part of the Olympic peninsula to raise chickens. It's a very funny book, although less about chickens than about the rough backwoods characters who inhabit the farmland around her house near Chillicum, Wa. Her portrayal of Ma and Pa Kettle is so wickedly funny that it inspired a TV series on the slovenly, lazy but warmhearted hillbillies (and not surprisingly, a lawsuit by the real-life Kettles, who settled out of court, according to historylink.org).

You can also read the book another way -- as a woman's revenge against her first husband for taking her out to the woods and making her live a life of perpetual hard labor in a remote, gloomy outpost in primitive housing, surrounded by uneducated hicks.

If you can get over her portrayal of Native Americans, which is rather uncomfortable, it's a pretty funny read.

From the book:

Gathering eggs would be like one continual Easter morning if the hens would just be obliging and get off the nests. Cooperation, however, is not a chickenly characteristic and so at egg-gathering time every nest was overflowing with hen, feet planted, and a shoot-if-you-must-this-old-gray-head look in her eye. I made all manner of futile attempts to dislodge her--sharp sticks, flapping apron, loud scary noises, lure of mash and grain--but she would merely set her mouth, clutch her eggs under her and dare me...

Just like TV

Here's a surprise about owning chickens: They're fun to watch.

We find ourselves spending a lot of time out at the coop, watching the girls do their thing. What, exactly, is their thing? Well, it involves a lot of scratching up dirt, chasing any bug that flies into the enclosure, eating greens we throw into the pen, chasing each other when one bird has an especially delectable morsel, standing up and beating wings in the air, going to the door of the coop and then flying down into the pen, and just generally being busy. Greg set an old bench up at the end of the coop, and we sit there in the late summer evenings, watching the girls and occasionally poking a worm or some chickweed through the mesh. They really like being hand-fed.

My theory is that we like to watch chickens because they're sort of like us: industrious and curious. They never stop looking for something to do.

How to catch a chicken

How hard is it to catch a chicken with your bare hands? Pretty hard, it turns out.

Gertrude/Chika slipped out of the chicken run this afternoon when Greg opened the door to throw in a handful of greens. Gracie the schnauzer, who was wandering around the yard, immediately gave chase. We've always wondered what would happen if there was no chicken wire between Gracie and the birds, but now was not the time to find out. I made a heroic, diving leap to grab the dog before she caught up with the bantie, scratching up my knee.

After tying Gracie up, Greg and I gave chase. Gertrude weaved in and out of the laurels, through the raspberries and over the raised beds. She darted in and out of difficult areas. I despaired of ever laying hands on her, and yet she clearly wanted to go back home, because she kept circling around to the pen. Eventually, we got her lined up near the door to the coop, Greg opened the door, I flushed her in, and all was well.

If our yard was enclosed, we could probably let the chickens out to roam. But it's not, and every so often a big dog -- liked the mixed breed next door -- rushes into the yard, leaping back and forth in front of the pen and scaring the chickens half to death. If they were out wandering around, they'd be dog food.

Big chickens

We came back from a one-week vacation, and the chickens were much bigger - rounder, taller, more full of themselves.

The kids have been careful observers, and have their own analysis of the chickens' personalities. (And different names for them, too.) Lauren thinks that Gertrude (alternate name: Chicka), the banty, may act like the helpless little chicken, but she's wily and sneaky and clever. She sneaks her way into treats and gets what she wants when nobody's looking. Lauren insists she has the longest attention span of the flock.

Mildred (alternate name: Gangsta), the Americauna, is aggressive and insanely hungry and gets what she wants, but loses track of almost everything immediately.

Wilma (I forget Wilma's alternate name) has the least personality of the three. She's still just a little bit bigger than the others. She jumps impressively high when food is poked through the fencing at the top of the coop.